Today, January 4, 2001, is the 100th birthday of C.L.R. James. He missed out
on the last 11 of these years. A more cynical person than I might count him
lucky on this account, but our responsibility is to engage in the necessary
retrospection to understand him and the century in which he lived, and, very
importantly, how the two intersected. Is there a way we can do this without
repeating the endless hollow overviews and without perpetuating the repellent
rituals of hero-worship?

The last decade has witnessed, among its many travails great and small, a strenuous
effort to establish James Studies as a viable and serious enterprise. The groundwork
has been laid, but how much has been built upon it over a decade? This is not
the place to cover the ground in detail, but some general observations are in
order.

Not to denigrate the efforts of others, but the most ground-breaking work was
achieved by Anna Grimshaw (in league with The C.L.R. James Institute), James's
personal assistant during much of his last decade up to his death, whose major
achievements within James Studies (i.e. not counting her work as an anthropologist),
involved the editing and publishing of James's own workmost importantly
hitherto unpublished materialsagainst the machinations of certain obstructionists,
and secondly, providing a guide in her own essays, articles, and pamphlets to
James's integrated vision. The 1990s saw numerous attempts either to augment
or strangle Grimshaw's singular achievement in raising James Studies to a new
level, but no published efforts have yet yielded a comparable leap to a new
synthesis that would definitively pinpoint James within the conceptual universe
of his century.

Not that more is not known or that no work has been done or that no comparative
studies have been attempted: bits and pieces are there. What do I mean? Allow
me to proceed by indirection.

James's engagement with the world begins with the social and mental universe
of colonial Trinidad, barely emergent from the world of British Victorianism.
As an autodidact he worked his way through the world, living it as a specifically
socially situated (if later in life marginalized) individual rather than as
an impersonal world epoch in general. He did not experience the civilizational
crisis of World War I as Europeans had experienced it. His world-view was not
toppled upside down nor was he affected by the avant-garde movements which were
a product of this upheaval. James absorbed the European crisis later through
Spengler, but it was not the same thing. By the time he got to experience it
for himself in the 1930s in Britain, he did so as a person conditioned in a
very different environment, with a freshness toward the world not having been
habituated by its terror in the same way as his European (or even American)
counterparts. He made totalitarian bureaucracy the basis of his oppositional
view, but he never knew the fear. And still less the pessimism.

James's trajectory continued through a 15-year engagement with the USA, which
saw the consolidation of his analytical methods, going beyond even his epochal
achievement in historiographyThe Black Jacobinsin collaboration
with the other eccentric autodidacts of his tendency. After his expulsion from
the USA in 1953, he retraced his steps several times for the rest of his life,
in Britain, Trinidad, and the USA. His other universally recognized achievement
was Beyond a Boundary, which explained not only the social meaning of
the appropriation of English cricket by colonized West Indians of African descent,
but the formation of his own life-world. It is not necessary now to enumerate
all his other significant publications, except to mention that the American
period yielded some comparably significant works: Mariners, Renegades, and
Castaways, the uncompleted but finally published American Civilization,
and one might even add Notes on Dialectics and State Capitalism and
World Revolution as his methodological summae.

I am being deliberately sketchy here, but I tell this abbreviated story to
show the barest outline of a trajectory that has been oft-told but insufficiently
analyzed. Neither the full extent of James's achievements have been adequately
analyzed nor his significant shortcomings: all of which are of a piece. One
cannot say that James exhaustively analyzed his world any more than we have
exhaustively analyzed him. James selectively absorbed his environment in an
original way, and selectivity implies omissions and commissions good and bad.
Filling in the gaps to place James accurately in our universe of knowledge has
not happened. Most comparisons with European thinkersGramsci, Adorno,
etc.remain superficial where they have been made at all. Some scholars
are on the trail, but it doesn't look like the world has yet really got it.
A new synthesis has not yet gelled.

And meanwhile the world has changed. The world to which James was applicable
if at all is gone. Though it has yet to be admitted, James is really of retrospective
value, for understanding our world retrospectively, not currently. Politically
and culturally, James is of limited use for the problems of the 21st century,
except to disabuse ourselves finally of the accumulated illusions of the 20th.
This in itself is no trivial task. We are situated at the brink of something
new and horrible. We can't think the new until we have definitively analyzed
what we have passed through so that we can clearly perceive how we are now distinct
from it. To paraphrase William Blake's obscure formulation, error must be given
a definite and determinate form so that it can be cast off; create a separate
space for it and then go someplace else.

The best we can do to honor James on his birthday, which in itself would have
just bored him, is to think and fight ourselves out of the old and into the
new.